I got burned last summer by bringing people on board too early. I'm the hacker-type.
The other people were the kind whose strengths too were different from mine. One was a high-powered client-interfacing guy, who has since taken a full time job as an IA, after the failure of his own Web 2.0 startup (all in under a year!). The other, and the troublemaker, was a high-powered marketing person who wanted to fasttrack the branding campaign before I even had a product or clients. We'd all worked together well in the context of a larger company, but we couldn't reconcile our directional aspirations for a startup.
So this year, I'm alone. In Northern Virginia's technology corridor. I would love a hackerly co-founder, or at least someone to bounce my ideas off of. All my friends from CS classes keep moving to the West coast to work for the Googles and Microsofts of the world. I have a feeling my YC application this year is going to be rejected simply because I'm a sole founder.
It could be fairly interesting to see if a couple of technical people, working on different products, could act as one company. Both parties get the benefits of having someone to look over their shoulder (as they have a financial stake). You also get the sum of both sets of secondary skills and contacts. The downside would be a split in focus, but that should be no worse than the two working individually.
Kind of a more-intensive, tech version of the Tuesday Night Music Club.
First rule: no bringing your girlfriend, even if she is Sheryl Crow.
The application certainly makes it seem that this is the case.
I'm currently doing requirements gathering for my first project, and I've already done around 400 lines of coding. I wish I wasn't alone.